SEO is hugely popular these days. Everyone wants to know the ins and outs of it so they can best apply it which can sometimes make it a tad complicated. In itself, this is not too bad. To understand SEO, you also need to know how a search engine works, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
How does a search engine work?
You have several search engines, but the most well-known is Google. Google falls under a crawlerbased search engine. A crawler is considered a (ro)bot that scours the Internet and indexes (stores) everything in a database. So when you enter a query, the bot goes to work and looks for the best results that match the query.
For a crawler to be able to find your website, it is important that there are no errors to be found in the design or else a crawler will not be able to read the website properly.
An algorithm is used to find the best search results. This algorithm applies a mathematical formula to determine the relevance of articles and thus show the right search results that match the search query. What exactly the algortime entails is not clear, what we do know is that your written content is important but also what others think of it (this by means of linking to an article.) When there are a lot of links from others to your Web site, especially certain articles, can have a positive effect in search results.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimizationand in Dutch this translates to search engine optimization.
Proper SEO means making sure crawlers can do their job, that is, making sure they can read the content properly. One tip I can give you right now is to test your website via W3C validator. This website shows errors in design that can affect the reading of your website. When you go to the site enter a URL, click validate and then you will see the results. Some are often a bit difficult to decipher. When you get an error message you don’t understand, do a quick Google search for a solution. There can be quite a few so it is difficult to cover it here. I always make sure that my own themes and those for clients are W3C validated and thus can be read properly by search engines.
In addition, writing relevant and unique articles that can be easily found by visitors also falls under proper SEO. This is where keywords come in handy. Based on keywords, articles are found by a crawler. There are a number of methods for writing a good article that contains proper SEO that I will highlight in another article soon.
